DIY Intel Optane w/ Samsung 960 Pro?

[acsemler]

Would it be possible to use one Samsung 960 Pro to cache multiple drives? With the 512gb model you could cache up to 8 hard drives drives with roughly 64gb each, or 6-7 if the true capacity is lower like it is with typical even capacity drives (500/750/1tb/etc...). I'm guessing there would be some kind of performance decrease if you were to have each hard drive actively being cached at the same time, pushing the read/write transfer speeds of the 960 Pro to the limit. Latency could be an issue too. This review here from storagereview.com on the 2tb version of the 960 Pro reports a write latency of around 25.5 microseconds compared to the Intel Optane 32gb model's 16 microsecond write latency which I found on Newegg. If it can be done at all and have comparable performance it could be a really cost effective way to cache multiple drives. To cache the same 8 drives you would need 8 Intel Optane modules and therefore 8 m.2 slots (good luck finding that lol) or 8 pcie ports that can do 4x minimum each. Probably not a practical setup but I think it would be interesting to see if it was possible.

 

[Zando_]

Why not just use the SSD as an SSD, and put the stuff you never use on the HDD? And I don't think it'd work, doesn't Optane require and Intel CPU and software, along with the actual Optane drive?

[acsemler]

1 hour ago, Zando Bob said:

Why not just use the SSD as an SSD, and put the stuff you never use on the HDD? And I don't think it'd work, doesn't Optane require and Intel CPU and software, along with the actual Optane drive?

The idea was to use a single high capacity high performance ssd as a cache for multiple drives, rather than have one Optane module per drive. It's not necessarily practical, I was just curious if it would work well enough to be an alternative to Intel Optane. If it did work, it would have the added bonus of not being bound to a specific platform like Optane.

[KuJoe]

This is what Facebook did many many years ago, they even open sourced the software: https://github.com/facebookarchive/flashcache

[KuJoe]

Also, some LSI RAID controllers have this functionality built in (license required I believe). The Facebook method is mostly good for read performance in my experience (I've only used Flashcache for one day on a single server 5+ years ago).

[Zando_]

18 minutes ago, acsemler said:

The idea was to use a single high capacity high performance ssd as a cache for multiple drives, rather than have one Optane module per drive. It's not necessarily practical, I was just curious if it would work well enough to be an alternative to Intel Optane. If it did work, it would have the added bonus of not being bound to a specific platform like Optane.

Yeah, but what do you need the cache for? Why not just run your apps and stuff of the SSD, using the HDDs for mass storage.

 

That's what I was trying to say. 

[acsemler]

20 minutes ago, KuJoe said:

This is what Facebook did many many years ago, they even open sourced the software: https://github.com/facebookarchive/flashcache

 

3 minutes ago, Zando Bob said:

Yeah, but what do you need the cache for? Why not just run your apps and stuff of the SSD, using the HDDs for mass storage.

 

That's what I was trying to say. 

Interesting stuff, thanks for the info.